Photo: Willem van de Pol, Suriname 1955 9 Apr 2025
17:00 - 20:00
Black Family Archives: Theorising on Death, Mourning and Discomfort
On 9 April, the workshop Black Family Archives: Theorising on Death, Mourning and Discomfort brings together Black Studies scholars Jan Mendes, Nawal Mustafa, and Wigbertson Julian Isenia with local Black feminist artist Camille Sapara Barton. It aims to examine questions of Black death, grief and mourning through methodologies that use familial narratives and oral histories as empirical materials to understand legacies of anti-Black racism.
During the workshop, emotions are pursued as a lens by which the archival material of Black family histories can be explored and complicated, as part of meditating on contested terrains where hope and its absence are continuously theorised.
Mendes, Mustafa and Isenia examine what the Black refusal to hope amid relentless anti-Black racism entails, recasting what might be understood as hopelessness as a deliberate stance of resistance. Second, they scrutinise the selective rewriting or forgetting of histories steeped in and shaped by racialised violence and the enduring legacies of colonialism, slavery, and painful racial oppression.
By addressing Black death at the European borders – where the demarcations of space itself lay bare the lethal consequences of racialised mobility, exclusionary and restrictive migration policies, and historical amnesia – they explore the structural mechanisms that produce the conditions that might lead to the refusal to hope.
Register here.
Programme
17:00 Introduction and intentions
17:10 Embodied grounding moment #1
17:15 Presentations by Jan Mendes, Nawal Mustafa, Wigbertson Julian Isenia and Camille Sapara Barton
18:15 Embodied grounding moment #2
18:20 Reading by Isenia, followed by a discussion moderated by Afra Foli
18:45 Short film by Barton
19:00 Q&A
About
Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist, and social justice facilitator. They have developed public resources, programs, and tools to cultivate the practice of tending grief with others. Rooted in Black Feminism, ecology, and harm reduction, Camille is dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures.
Afra Foli researches everyday practices of infrastructure. From this she has published on how infrastructure mediates political authority and the visceral politics of drainage in Accra, Ghana. Her current work is on spatial imaginaries of infrastructure and visioning as process.
Wigbertson Julian Isenia is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. As a researcher, they are deeply influenced by their experiences as a Black non-binary person from Curaçao, combining postcolonial, gender, and cultural studies with anthropology and archival studies.
Jan Mendes is a Black Studies and Media Studies scholar whose research interrogates how affects are machinated against Black and Black Muslim bodies and desires within Northern welfare nations. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality studies with the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam.
Nawal Mustafa is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on intersectional aspects of Islamophobia, racism and sexism, and the ways in which these issues are shaped by law. Prior to her PhD, Mustafa worked with Amnesty International, Humanity In Action, and founded SPEAK, a platform for Muslim women in the fight against structural racism.
This event is in English. Admission is free.
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This event may be photographed and filmed. Kindly let us know in advance if you prefer not to have your picture taken.
Framer Framed is supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; Amsterdam Fund for the Arts; Municipality of Amsterdam; and VriendenLoterij Fonds.
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